Govt policy on ARVs might change
In an exclusive interview with Health-e, Dr Nomonde Xundu, Chief Director of the HIV/AIDS cluster in the national Department of Health, indicated that discussions are underway on the issue.
“Yes, indeed we started the process consulting, getting views, getting inputs and we put together recommendations that have been processed internally in the Department of Health and I’m saying after much consultation with expert groups and so on, the Department of Health has interrogated the recommendations quite extensively and made some further inputs which were incorporated,” she said.
However, Xundu refused to disclose detailed information, saying doing so “would jeopardize discussions” that are currently underway.
Nonkosi Khumalo, chairperson of the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC), says her organization has been calling upon the government to follow the World Health Organization’s recommendations – which advise that people with HIV should start ARVs when their CD4 cell count drops to 350.
“The recommendations around the globe, which is what we are also advising, is that people start treatment at around 350 than the proposed 200 at the moment, because that’s already late,” Nonkosi said.
“When you reach a CD4 count of 200 you are more susceptible to more opportunistic infections, and so it means your pill burden is much more at that point in time than you are at 350 where there are very few cases of people who would have active TB and actually needing to take antiretrovirals,” she added.
Although it is still not clear what the final outcome will be, a source close to the discussions said current deliberations appear to be suggesting that the cut-off CD4 cell count measure to qualify for ARV treatment be reduced to only 250.
Author
Health-e News is South Africa's dedicated health news service and home to OurHealth citizen journalism. Follow us on Twitter @HealtheNews
Republish this article
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Unless otherwise noted, you can republish our articles for free under a Creative Commons license. Here’s what you need to know:
You have to credit Health-e News. In the byline, we prefer “Author Name, Publication.” At the top of the text of your story, include a line that reads: “This story was originally published by Health-e News.” You must link the word “Health-e News” to the original URL of the story.
You must include all of the links from our story, including our newsletter sign up link.
If you use canonical metadata, please use the Health-e News URL. For more information about canonical metadata, click here.
You can’t edit our material, except to reflect relative changes in time, location and editorial style. (For example, “yesterday” can be changed to “last week”)
You have no rights to sell, license, syndicate, or otherwise represent yourself as the authorized owner of our material to any third parties. This means that you cannot actively publish or submit our work for syndication to third party platforms or apps like Apple News or Google News. Health-e News understands that publishers cannot fully control when certain third parties automatically summarise or crawl content from publishers’ own sites.
You can’t republish our material wholesale, or automatically; you need to select stories to be republished individually.
If you share republished stories on social media, we’d appreciate being tagged in your posts. You can find us on Twitter @HealthENews, Instagram @healthenews, and Facebook Health-e News Service.
You can grab HTML code for our stories easily. Click on the Creative Commons logo on our stories. You’ll find it with the other share buttons.
If you have any other questions, contact info@health-e.org.za.
Govt policy on ARVs might change
by Health-e News, Health-e News
July 31, 2008